Travellers to Third World countries get a lesson on empowering their hosts

Adventure With Purpose and Fair Trade Calgary hosted an event about how to empower local communities while travelling, on Jan. 17 in downtown Calgary.

Tatiana Teevens, the director of Adventure With Purpose, was the main speaker at the event and discussed how travellers can have a positive impact on the places they go.

“As a tour agency, we know how much impact travel can have on the places we visit,” said Teevens.

Teevens has been planning tours for five years and just incorporated Adventure With Purpose last year.

Adventure With Purpose is a travel company that specializes in conservation, education and learning tours in Nepal, Cambodia, Mexico and North America.

“We have to enter a place with this humble ideology that I’m here to learn from you first, rather than I’m here to fix you,” said Teevens.

Teevens said that one of the biggest problems travellers and volunteers create is coming into a country and not understanding the culture and thinking that they know everything and how to fix their hosts’ problems.

“We really need to focus on what is great and empower them in their own communities,” she said.

Some common misconceptions people have about helping other countries are things like donations, and playing with kids in orphanages. In reality these do more harm then good.

“Donations create dependency and a lot of the times donations go towards corrupt institutions,” said Teevens.

“Would we in Canada, let a bunch of volunteers from a foreign country come and take selfies with vulnerable kids in orphanages?” Teevens asked the group.

“No we wouldn’t, so why do we do it in developing countries?”

Teevens said that the people who come and play with the kids often have the best intentions but they need to think of the kids’ feelings first.

The Spokeswoman: Tatiana Teevens poses in from of a Fair Trade sign at a discussion about empowering local communities while travelling, on Wednesday Jan. 17, 2018, in downtown Calgary. Teevens is the director of the company, Adventure With Purpose, which is a volunteer tourism group that allow travellers to experience the culture and nature of their destination in an educational, respectful way. (Photo by Kathryn Higdon/The Press)